


How Soon Is Now?

by glitsune



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Kissing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 16:11:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5297750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitsune/pseuds/glitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris feels everything with an overwhelming intensity, whether ridiculously happy or crushingly miserable. Orin feels very little of anything, other than a confusing attraction to Chris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Soon Is Now?

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the Valentine's Party in "Operation Ann" (4.14)

When they had first arrived at the party, a slow funeral march had been booming out over the crowd. Then a solemn Gregorian chant, followed by ten minutes of non-stop whalesong.

  
"It's beautiful," Orin intoned softly "It makes me think about death."

  
"Oh, yeah." April muttered, stroking his hand where it was resting on her shoulder and shooting sly looks at her boss, the blonde woman she used Orin frequently to annoy "I guess he got dumped or something and now he's like, super sad."

  
She nodded her head at the man sitting on the stage. Chris Traeger. Orin hadn't bothered to remember the names of April's workmates, but he knew that one, largely because the man had talked to him enthusiastically about the wonder of mortality and the fragility of life for a long time at a Halloween party and had left Orin so overwhelmed and dizzy he'd had to leave and sit down, his cheeks flushed under the layer of white foundation he'd been wearing. He was the most positive person Orin had ever met, and Orin usually took pride in the fact that he could make anybody recognise the misery in life. Now, it seemed that life had made Chris Traeger recognise misery despite his attempts to be happy all of the time. That made Orin feel something, but he wasn't quite sure what.

  
About half an hour later, April came to sit with him under the table where Orin had been lurking, ostensibly to unnerve the other guests of the party, but also to watch Chris Traeger. Usually, at these Valentine's Day events, Orin's melancholy was an anathema to the happy couples who wanted to pretend that their romantic feelings were somehow more special and eternal than anything else on this planet, but he felt somehow redundant here, since the soundtrack was so depressing that the mood of the room was already more miserable than anything he could create. He wasn't sure that he liked that. Apathy felt much more trite when everybody else was equally disenfranchised.

  
"Why are you trying to help that woman find a date?" Orin asked, and April shifted uncomfortably, a movement so small that possibly only Orin would have been able to recognise it.

  
"I dunno. I hate her. I don't care what happens to her. I guess just, because I can. I want to see if I can."

  
Orin considered that. He wondered if there was value in trying to make sad people happy. It felt like that went against everything he stood for. Happiness was fleeting and empty. That was what he had always told people. Then again, that was what had brought him and April together as friends, and now April was married to a man who seemed to embody thoughtless happiness. Maybe that balance was something worth thinking about. If there weren't happy people, then there was nobody to react to Orin and April, and that made everything they did to try and freak people out seem completely pointless.

  
When Chris Traeger walked behind the stage for a drink, Orin was standing there in a corner, half cloaked in shadow. That was the sort of thing that usually tended to unnerve people, but somehow it hadn't bothered Chris the first time they had met, when Chris was ridiculously positive, and didn't bother him now that he was equally negative.

  
"I like the music." Orin told him flatly.

  
"I don't," Chris sighed "It's miserable, just like me. How do you do it? Being sad all the time? I feel like I'm being crushed. I feel like my heart is being trampled by a herd of wildebeest. I feel--"

  
"I don't," Orin said, hoping his surprise didn't show in his voice "I'm not sad. I'm not anything."

  
"I wish I could be like that. Calm and still and quiet. Everything I feel, good or bad, it's like a storm in my soul, taking up every inch of my being. Right now that's a storm of despair. I thought I had found love, but she didn't feel the same way."

  
"Other people are all that make you happy?"

  
Orin hadn't actually meant that as a question, but it seemed to come out that way.

"Yes, I suppose so. Although other people's happiness used to make me feel so much joy, and right now it just makes me feel even more alone. Don't you feel the same way?"

  
That was something that Orin didn't really like to think about, the amount that other people's opinion of him shaped his behaviour. But deep down, he knew it to be true. He wouldn't do things publicly, like art shows, performance pieces, coming with April to these parties, if it wasn't true on some level.

  
At some point, they had moved closer to talk, so close that he could feel Chris' breath on his face. Orin was an intense presence, and so was Chris, so that ended up with them both standing very close, gazing silently at each other. Orin never felt uncomfortable or awkward, that was what he did to other people not what they did to him, and yet his fingers were trembling inside his sleeveless gloves, his arms held taut at his sides to try and retain a sense of stillness. Chris had this effect on him, he didn't quite understand it himself, and he had been curious to find out if Chris' abrupt change from being so positive would have made a difference. It hadn't. That intense emotion was still there, and it seemed to almost be contagious.

  
"I wish I could just, stop feeling." Chris whispered, gazing at Orin with such a penetrating stare that Orin felt as though he was attempting to burrow into his mind through his eyes.

  
"Everybody else hides their feelings. You don't. That's... good."

  
At that point, Chris cupped his face with both hands and kissed him hard on the mouth. It was meant to be a small kiss, a thank-you kiss, a non-verbal gesture to express an emotion that he couldn't put into words, but to both of their surprise, just as Chris broke the connection between their lips, Orin leant in to re-establish the kiss, with a passion that nobody would ever have known from looking at him. Chris clung to him as though he was all that anchored him to this earth, his grasp on Orin's shoulders hard enough to bruise the pale overly delicate flesh, and Orin silently relished that, relished how it made him feel, and that it made him feel at all. They were both of them mostly hidden by shadows now, but not particularly caring if they were visible or not. This was too important. Chris' lips were firm, warm, and gave him life, made him feel alive in a way that he should have found terrifying but instead found exhilarating.

  
"You," Chris murmured, in between little kisses on Orin's lips and down his jaw "Are a wonderful, beautiful human being. Thank you, Orin. You've made me feel so grounded."

  
Maybe April had been right, that making people uncomfortable wasn't the only worthwhile experience. And yet, Orin hadn't even really been intending to make Chris feel a certain way, and he would be lying if he said that Chris wasn't having an important effect on him. For once, he felt a certain purpose, a certain rush of feeling, of connection, that caring for somebody could be something other than a curse. But of course, he would lie if anybody asked him.

  
"Did you talk to Chris?" April asked, with an odd searching expression, when Orin reappeared in the main hall.

  
Orin looked at her blankly, and then over at Chris, who was throwing himself about the hall with joyous abandon, the dirges that had been playing over the speaker system now replaced with upbeat popular music that Orin didn't care to know much about.

  
"That's horrifying." he said "I should leave."

  
But when he got outside, and away from prying eyes, the first thing he did was to check under his sleeve, that the hastily scribbled phone number that Chris had left there hadn't smudged away, and he allowed himself the tiniest of smiles.


End file.
